In hydraulic construction machines such as hydraulic excavators, maintenance has been conventionally carried out by servicemen who periodically make the rounds of their assigned areas. The servicemen measure operation data of the hydraulic construction machines and component parts thereof, and predict the life of each part based on design data and experiences. Then, the servicemen individually manage the timing of maintenance and other information to prevent the occurrence of failures.
To cope with those situations, as disclosed in, e.g., JP,A 2000-259729, an information providing system for construction machines is already known in which, by utilizing the recent information communication technology, information such as operation data of construction machines distributed all over the world is transmitted to one place so that the information of all the construction machines is collected and managed in a centralized manner based on the transmitted data.
According to that prior-art system, the operating status of each construction machine is detected as operation data by operation sensors, and the detected operation data is periodically transmitted by an operation data communicating device to a support center installed in one certain place. The support center receives the transmitted operation data and records it in a main database. Based on the recorded operation data, the support center predicts a possibility of the occurrence of failures for each construction machine and automatically outputs a report. Such a system configuration liberates the servicemen from skills otherwise required for prediction of failures and enables the prediction of failures to be always made at a certain level of accuracy.